Other records I really liked and listened to a lot:Preacher Roe - Blood Root RemedyBesides really good songs and production this is a real guitar record - great guitar sounds.Duquette Johnston - Rugged & FancyGot Lost & Stayed is my song of the year - they don't get any more beautiful than this.

Horse To Water - JunkieGreat songs with superb narratives that come from experience and age.The musicianship is great and while he doesn't have a natural singing voice he worked at it and it gives his songs authority.

Ghost Shirt - DanielLiked this a lot. Good songs, good playing.

Bruce Springsteen - The Promise

CeeLo Green - Lady KillerIn spite of the FU song I like this record. It's a great soul record.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Nicholas Nixon came onto the photographic radar in 1975 with his inclusion in the seminal exhibit New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Since then his work has appeared everywhere from the MOMA in NYC to the Corcoran in Washington DC to the MFA in Boston. His work has gone through many chages since 1975 and he is more well known for his images of people than for his work in landscape. His subjects have included intimate pictures of his family, old people in nursing homes, street portraits, a project called People with Aids - all photographed with an 8x10 view camera. But probably his best known body of work is the series made of his wife Bebe and her 3 sisters (The Brown Sisters). Begun in 1975 and photographed annually the series has become one of the most powerful collective portraits of siblings ever imagined. In this exhibit at the MFA they are grouped together chronoligically in a grid. We follow them year by year and see them age, and along the way we are engaged in an intimate narrative with the four women. We don't really know much about them personally so what emerges is a universal portrait as we try to imagine who they really are and what are they like.

Along with the Brown Sisters project are pictures of Bebe along with their children engaged in normal everyday activities that draw you into their lives and make you think about what you have in common with them.

All of the work is deceptively simple in execution. At times they have the feeling of snapshots. The prints are beautifully crafted from 8x10 negatives and at times I wondered how he ever made a particular shot with such a large bulky camera.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Comment left on Flickr by Ron Tallis:This is, at least until now, the acme of this series. It bundles a lot of sensations and thoughts. This is like an image on a headstone of someone dead young. The stained walls in the background and the scenary details are infinite. Just one example: is this a dead mouse on the left?

Monday, August 2, 2010

Photographed in Wompatuck State Park, Hingham, MA. This was made in an area that was the US Navy's munitions factories. Most of the buildings have been torn down but there's still a few standing that the local kids paint with grafitti while partying.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Shot in Washington DC at the Newseum. They have installed some segments of the Berlin Wall along with a guard turret. The display emphasized the role of the media in the tearing down of the wall. Although it seemed to me to be placed in a pop culture context rather than as a symbol of repression and terror that it actually was.

Monday, July 12, 2010

This photo wast taken at a club called d.b.a.'s on Frenchman Street in New Orleans. I was trying to capture the late night atmosphere of a jazz bar in the summer. The band was called the Palmetto Stompers and they played in an early jazz style. Folks were dancing and drinking and it had a steamy, sweaty soulful feeling.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

I found this talisman/mojo while walking my dog in the park. They seem to be crow feathers bound with a red wire pipecleaner. I don't understand its significance. Maybe just a good luck charm or some kind of "offering" to nature's spirits.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

"And it will be golden and eternal just like that ---- There's no need to say another word."

For a pure soul baring, raw piece of writing, you can't beat Jack Kerouac's Big Sur. It's the story of his decline - both spiritually and of the flesh. He was probably at his creative peak, but the basis of his story had already begun to kill him. He knew he wanted to get away from the fame and noteriety. He knew he should get sober. And this is the story of a last ditch attempt at both.

In short, he realises what he needs to do and plans a trip to San Francisco to use Ferlinghetti's cabin up at Big Sur to clean up and get his soul together. It becomes a vivid, harrowing story of his effort for salvation through drunkeness, the DTs, falling for his friend's girl Wilamine, the traps of his own philosphy which ultimately ends with his family and desire for the Catholicism which is a part of his being. It isn't easy to grasp for him, or the reader. It is scarey and brilliant and is worth reading and rereading.

The book ends with a beautiful, epic poem simply entitled "Sea".

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard released an album of music entitled "One Fast Move or I'm Gone - Music from Kerouac's Big Sur". They excerpt his words from the novel and poem and weave a lyrical poem of their own. They captured the beauty and horror of Kerouac's experience in a song cycle that is as moving as the novel.

Monday, May 31, 2010

I saw the 2010 version of the Yardbirds last Friday at Showcase Live in Foxboro, MA. The Yardbirds are probably my favorite band from the Brittish invasion and I won't make any excuses for seeing this band. No Clapton, Page or Beck. Keith Relf is long dead. All that is left of the original band are Jim McCarty (drums) and Chris Dreja (guitar). The new young members are Andy Mitchell (vocals, harp), Ben King (guitar), and David Small (bass). They are terrific. The young guys have a feel for the music and nobody is try to pretend that they are the originals. They just make great, inspired Yardbirds music.